Channeling the American spirit

“Super Bowl Sunday” is often an exercise in over-manufactured hype, with selected football players on both sides of the pigskin made out to be “heroes” when they are anything but.

The television commercials can be just as awful – the GoDaddy.com advertisements come to mind here – but in rare instances, they can transcend the mindless hullabaloo made over a simple game.

Chrysler achieved that not once but twice during this weekend’s contest between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens, with the first a sterling tribute to our military men and women who are still off serving our nation in combat zones far, far away from their homes:

Chrysler scored a second time with moving tribute to America’s farmers penned by the late Paul Harvey many years ago.

The family farmer is a dying breed in this country – indeed, most farms today are owned and controlled by gigantic corporate entities – but the sheer toughness of body, mind, and spirit required of farming speaks to something elemental in the American character.

Let us just hope that the parts of the American spirit illuminated by these two commercials are not something that we’ve lost; that they do not fade away like embers in a dying fire.